Two Of The Best With Two Of The Best

02Sep

Good afternoon, happy Saturday!

So you always get those times in a calendar year where no good albums at all come out, and then you get those times where so many great, brilliant records come out and you’re absolutely bombarded! The latter is definitely happening at the moment in music I feel, not forgetting also that we are building up to the winner of this year’s prestigious Mercury Music prize being announced.

We start with Queens of the Stone Age. Coolest rock band on the planet? Possibly behind Foo Fighters you may argue. Anyway, they’ve just released their seventh studio album titled ‘Villains’. There’s no doubt that it would have taken a massive record with many top quality songs to even be spoken in the same breath as sixth colossus, ‘…Like Clockwork’, but it’s certainly up there.

Smooth, silky, sexy, even boppy to some degree; ‘Villains’ is full of heavy guitar-driven behemoths of songs such as ‘The Evil Has Landed’ and ‘Domesticated Animals’. Synths are even included, as lead single ‘The Way You Used To Do’ fuses Californian distortion with drops of electro. The whole record is dark, but also feel-good. Really great listen.

Secondly, we come to one of my favourite bands, currently and of all time; LCD Soundsystem. ‘American Dream’ has only been in stores for around twenty-eight hours at the time of writing this blog post. It’s been purchased and I’m listening to it right now. Wow, it is phenomenal. I’m probably biased because I adore all the albums and still to this day they hold a top five place in my best gigs ever – but it’s fantastic.

With so much inspiration from 70’s and 80’s retro groups and electro, James Murphy has planned and tirelessly worked hard on every track. He’s documented some of the production of the album on social media and you can really sense that LCD have gone back to some of their roots from the self-titled debut era. ‘Tonite’ must be a throwback to old-school funk-soul electronica. ‘Emotional Haircut’ is loud, bombastic and barbaric, similar to how ‘Movement’ was on the debut; and it doesn’t matter how long closer ‘Black Screen’ may be, it’s hypnotic and scintillating.

This is a band whose musicianship is hugely underrated in my opinion, and are live performers like no other. Every album is a masterpiece, ‘American Dream’ being the latest to the collection.